Search Engines: A few tricks to help.
First of all I’d like to point out that there are numerous search engines out there. There are different types of search engines that differ in how they look for things on the internet.. Google is a popular search engine that has chapters of its service all over the world. To find some of these other google search engines, go to google and type that area in the google search box. Example, to get the google in Germany, type in ‘google Germany’ and hit enter. This should bring up a list that will have google Germany in it. This can be useful knowledge if you are seeking information that is proprietary to the Germany area.
Here in the United States, google is not the only effective search engine. Google is one of the good ones, but not the only one. Some other good ones are yahoo, search, alta vista, clusty and exalead just to name a few.
Play around with these search engines. You will notice each search engine gives different results. Some will show minor differences, others will show extreme differences in search results. With all search engines you can change the search results sometimes by the way you type the entry in the search box. Try typing a asterisk before or after the item you are searching for. You will notice this can change the search results in most cases, sometimes bringing up different or more results.
Web search engines in other countries can do the same thing. For example in Australia, Web Wombat is a great search engine that specializes in internet content from Australia and New Zealand. Using wild cards on these search engines works very well too.
Getting back to here in America, some much smaller less common search engines may have information the bigger search engines don’t have. It may benefit you to get used to using more than one search engine for that reason.
Reporter Joseph Toth
Washington Micro Bank BBS
